Chapter 3 – Targeting fat loss in place of indiscriminate weight loss
When your goal is weight loss, always look to lose fat weight only, never lean weight. If you lose weight overall, but then find that a significant proportion of that loss has come from your lean body mass stores, you must learn to view this type of weight loss in a negative light since it has actually moved you further away from your long term health and fitness goals.
Weight loss which comprises a relatively small component of lean weight can be considered a partial success. However, you should really try to retain all your healthy lean mass if at all possible. The ideal outcome is one in which you lose fat weight only whilst maintaining all your lean mass reserves.
The only good weight loss is fat loss. You should learn to differentiate between the term ‘weight loss’ and the term ‘fat loss’. The misconception that any weight loss is good should be discarded straight away. In fact, I would argue that to know simply that you have lost weight overall, without knowing what the breakdown of that loss is in terms of lean and fat content, is to know next to nothing about whether you’ve improved your health or your body composition. So disregard ‘overall weight’ and start to think only about losing fat weight and maintaining or gaining lean weight.
Weight is largely meaningless as an index of fitness and health, so you should cease worshipping the scales or any other measures which are based on weight alone such as the Body Mass Index (BMI). Neither your scales nor the BMI will tell you anything about your actual body composition. An accurate body fat reading, on the other hand, gives you an instant measurement of your body composition. Unlike total weight readings, your body fat percentage addresses the all-important question of what your body is made up of. So forget about weight loss. Your only goals should be shedding fat and maintaining or gaining lean weight.
Losing weight is very easy, but losing fat and keeping it off – without losing muscle – is much more of a challenge, and the only challenge worth pursuing. For example, where drastic weight loss is concerned, you could lose as much as 10-15lbs over a weekend simply by dehydrating yourself and using natural diuretics. However, this would constitute weight loss only in a nominal sense. This type of weight loss does you absolutely no good since it’s all water and you’re just going to gain it all back within a few days.
Ignoring solitary scale weight readings in favour of weight readings combined with body fat measurements is a difficult shift in mind-set to make, but is an essential one to your long term success. The only goals worthy of your efforts are fat loss and muscle gain, not indiscriminate weight loss and weight gain.
Inspirational quote: For the great mass of mankind, the only saving grace needed is a steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart for the short moment of each human effort….. Joseph Conrad
